How Gangs of Wasseypur was made
Reviewed by Suresh Kohli

Gangs Of Wasseypur: The Making of a Modern Classic
by Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madangarli
HarperCollins India 
Pages 458 Rs 399

The main narrative begins with "One cannot locate Wasseypur on a Dhanbad town map, neither in the Dhanbad district authority map, nor the one from the Dhanbad Municipal Corporation. Riddled with small alleys and bylanes that are said to be a boon to criminals who could lose their pursuers in the maze, Wasseypur is divided into nineteen-odd mohallas, and occupies just two to three streets in the urban area of Dhanbad." This then becomes the camera-shuttling field for Anurag Kashyap's fact-fictional five hours thirty minutes too-long proposed epic from "a 240-page screenplay which would approximate a six-and-a-half-hour movie."

Painfully researched, coupled with lore music dug and culled from international location for authentic feel and actual lingua franca systematically planned for one-take static camera shoots (no tracks, cranes, gyps) that cannot generally be altered or segmented on the editing table though they were "later edited to several scenes", Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madangarli's narrative is a literal blow-by-blow account of how a story, that begins in 1940 and ends in 2004, is successfully converted to the screen over a three-year phase.at the end of which the maker felt "sucked" and "dry" and wanted to "get it out of my system" though that was not to be. There are parts of the 171-page narrative, followed by 281-page actual screenplay of the two-part movie that invoked considerable interest, and audience response for the first part, that are too technical to be of interest to a common reader irrespective of whether he has seen the film or not. Or is sharp enough to analyse it frame-by-frame with a video running in front of him. But the narrative succeeds in throwing up considerable human interest stories, what all hardships they went through and jumbled up collecting raw material in search of complete authentication. One can't think of another project in the 100-year history of Indian cinema where such collective manpower strength had put into action.

In a confessional at the end of the first part, Kashyap explains: "Wasseypur is also a mix of reportage and stories that people have narrated — people, stories and urban legends. That's how stories are told, and that's how stories are written. The problem is that we are not used to storytelling any more. Our cinema is black and white. Black is Bollywood and white is pure, real cinema of the seventies."

Elaborating on the director's somewhat unusual style of filmmaking, the authors note: "For him, the script is a map and each location on it a space to be explored. His cinematic vocabulary does not restrict the word "location" to the physical nature of the space where the process of "lights, camera, action! rolls out." Also, in the same chapter "How Anurag Shot His Movie," that largely deals with the director's style of filmmaking, and taking, there is mention of his fondness for improvisation. "Once he writes the script, he is not bound to it, which is what is brilliant about him."

The authors generally go about their work in a clinical and scientific manner there are moments they fall prey to the ghumakkar, or to borrow Anurag Kashyap's expression, ghumakkadu manner they largely succeed in keeping the narrative interesting, seldom forgetting that their handiwork is meant for the average cinephile and not for a serious student of cinema who will, however, will be as much a gainer, notwithstanding the fact that all producers/directors don't have Kashyap's luck though he does concede "to bowing to the audience expectations" and "Part 1 was done the way it was because of a lot of insecurities," despite which the audience lapped it up though similar response was conspicuous by its very absence`85the gore actually out-shadowing the story element.

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